By: Ankita Kulkarni
November 28 2023
2018 video shared as Palestinian mother meeting her son amid recent Israel-Hamas war
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A screenshot of a social media post carrying the video claiming that it shows a Palestinian woman meeting her son after he was released by Israel as a part of short-term ceasefire agreement. (Source: X/Facebook/Screenshot/Modified by Logically Facts)
Fact-Check
The Verdict Misleading
The video dates back to 2018 and is unrelated to the current truce between Israel and Hamas.
Claim ID 3a1fd1e2
What's the claim?
On the night of Saturday, November 25, as part of a four-day truce and prisoner-hostage exchange deal between Israel and Hamas, Hamas released a second group of hostages to Israel. CBS News reported that Hamas released 17 hostages, and Israel freed 39 Palestinian women and children from the jail.
Amid this, a video of a woman weeping and running towards a man to hug him is going viral on social media, with claims it shows a Palestinian mother meeting her son who has just been released in the ceasefire agreement. One such post on X (archived here) with the video had the caption translated from Arabic: "After twenty years of imprisonment, pain, separation, and torment, a Palestinian mother meets her son, who was released as part of a prisoner exchange deal yesterday. What pain are you talking about, world?" The post has gained 167,400 views and is being shared widely across Facebook (archived here) with a similar claim. Other archived versions are here, here, and here.
Screenshot of posts on social media (Source: X/Facebook/Screenshot/Modified by Logically Facts)
However, the video is not recent; it's from 2018.
What are the facts?
A reverse search of the keyframes of the video led us to a Facebook post published on February 12, 2018, containing the same video. The page is from a community group called "Al Mujtamae Al liybiu." The post's caption, translated from Arabic, reads, "He was imprisoned at the age of 18 and released at the age of 38. His mother had been patient for all these years, but she could not be patient for these minutes. She ran to him and crossed everything. #Mother Hadi, come on, mother. Oh God, protect our mother, Lord of the worlds."
A report published by Al-Jumhuriya Al-Youm, a local media outlet covering Arab news, on February 11, 2018, also carried the same video and stated that it shows a Palestinian man meeting his mother after spending 20 years in an Israeli occupation prison.
Screenshot of the report published by Al-Jumhuriya Al-Youm. (Source: Al-Jumhuriya Al-Youm/Screenshot)
We found the same video posted on another Facebook group named "Ae shayrat Al shureat" on November 4, 2018. The caption stated, "Watch a touching video... A Palestinian mother hugs her son who was arrested in the Israeli occupation prisons when he was 18 years old and left when he was 38 years old."
The verdict
The viral clip shows a man being released from an Israeli prison but dates back to 2018. It does not depict a current prisoner-hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas. Therefore, we have marked the claim as misleading.